Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [12]
He worked at Consolidated Number Five, right down the holler. The seam of coal was only three feet high, and you can bet they didn’t bother cutting the rock to give the men a place to stand up. That meant the miners had to crawl on their hands and knees and work on their sides or lying on their backs. Some of the miners wore knee pads, like the basketball players wear, but Daddy found that they raised him up so high that his back rubbed against the roof as he crawled into the mine. So he would come home every night with his knees all cut and sore, and he’d soak them in hot water before he could go to sleep. But the next morning he’d be out working in the garden again, until it was time to go to the mine.
Daddy worked the night shift. He left home around four o’clock every afternoon and walked down the holler. We kids, we hardly said good-bye to him. But looking back, I can see the worried look on Mommy’s face. She would keep busy with the kids all afternoon and evening. She had her hands full. But after we were in bed, she would sit by the kerosene lamp and read her Bible or an old Western book until she heard Daddy coming up the steps. They’d lie in bed talking, but I never heard him complain about the mines. Coal miners are funny that way. They don’t like to get their wives upset. I remember when that Hyden mine blew up in Kentucky, on December 30, 1970, and I got myself in a big jam trying to raise money for those coal miners’ kids’ education—I’ll tell more about that later on in this book. Some of those widows testified later that their husbands had warned them about the dangerous blasting they were doing in the mine. But the wives knew enough not to ask any questions, or else their husbands would have been laid off. I feel real proud of Daddy for working in the mines. He kept his family alive by breaking his own body down. That’s the only way to look at it.
In the coal fields, you were never far from a disaster. When I was little, there was a big explosion in a mine above Van Lear that killed a lot of men. Other times, men would get killed in single accidents. I’ve walked past the mine when they were bringing out the men who were in a gas explosion. I remember all the women and children standing around, mostly crying. When I heard about the Hyden disaster, I could just picture those poor people huddled around a fire waiting for word about their men. That’s what life is like whenever your man is a coal miner. I guess that’s why I’m so soft on coal miners. I call my band “The Coal Miners,” and whenever I meet a guy at one of my concerts who says he was a coal miner, why, my eyes just get full of tears because I know how those men suffer.
Like I said before, my Daddy had high blood pressure and migraine headaches. I’ve seen him walk the floor many a night, crying from the pain. But when you’re a kid, you don’t think about it. One time they wrapped Daddy up in an old quilt Mommy made out of overalls and took him down the holler on an old wooden sled. Somebody said to me, “Your Daddy won’t be back.” I didn’t really understand what they meant. But after some time in the hospital, he came back. He couldn’t catch a cold or he’d get real sick. He’d get up every morning and light a fire, so he wouldn’t get sick. And when Daddy started getting that regular miner’s paycheck again, he would drag home groceries on a wooden sled he built himself.
After he worked in the mines for a few years, he had trouble breathing. The doctors used to say that a miner was “nervous” or that he smoked too much. They didn’t know about black lung in those days. Black lung is what you get when you breathe in too much coal dust. It never leaves your lungs—just stays there and clogs up your breathing, puts extra strain on your heart.
They used to tell the miners that coal dust was good for you, that it helped ward off colds. Or they’d tell a miner he would get sicker from dirty sheets than from working in a coal mine—lots of stupid things, but nobody knew any better